A 'flood of GOP-aligned polls' are pushing 'election forecasts in Trump’s favor'

23 October 2024

With the United States' 2024 presidential election less than two weeks away, many of the national and battleground state polls highlighted on FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics continue to show a very close race.

National polls released on October 22 show Democratic nominee Kamala Harris leading GOP rival Donald Trump by 4 percent (Morning Consult) or 3 percent (Reuters/Ipsos and YouGov), but Trump has a 1 percent lead in a Rasmussen poll that came out the same day. Rasmussen, like Trafalgar and Quantus, is a right-wing pollster.

In an article published by The New Republic on October 23, journalists Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky emphasize that GOP-aligned pollsters, according to critics, are making a concerted effort to create the impression of Trump enjoying momentum during the final days of his 2024 campaign.

Sargent and Tomasky report, "A flood of GOP-aligned polls has been released for the precise purpose of influencing the polling averages, and thus the election forecasts, in Trump's favor.… Coming at a time when right-wing disinformation is soaring — and Trump's most feverish ally, Elon Musk, is converting X into a bottomless sewer pit of MAGA-pilled electoral propaganda — these critics see all this as a hyper-emboldened version of what happened in 2022, when GOP polls flooded the polling averages and arguably helped make GOP Senate candidates appear stronger than they were, leading to much-vaunted predictions of a 'red wave.'"

The journalists report that according to critics, right-wing pollsters are trying to create an "illusion" of momentum in Trump's favor.

"This illusion is essential to Trump's electoral strategy, goes this reading, and GOP-aligned data firms are concertedly attempting to build up that impression, both in the polling averages and in media coverage that is gravitationally influenced by it," Sargent and Tomasky explain. "They are also engaged in a data-driven psyop designed to spread a sense of doom among Democrats that the election is slipping away from them."

Sargent and Tomasky point out that the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight and others deny that right-wing pollsters are significantly affecting their polling averages. But an important question to ask, according to Sargent and Tomasky, is: "Why include GOP-leaning polls in the averages in the first place?"

"Take Pennsylvania," the New Republic journalists note. "We examined all the polls from October that FiveThirtyEight includes in its averages. As of October 22, there have been 19 polls conducted wholly in the month of October so far. Eleven are either from right-leaning firms or from firms polling for right-wing news outlets such as the Daily Mail and The Telegraph…. We should emphasize: We don't know which firms are 'correct.'"

Sargent and Tomasky continue, "In any case, they're all within the margin of error. But the pattern here is clear: many right-leaning pollsters and their clients are producing polling that is narrowly more pro-Trump."

Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky's full report for The New Republic is available at this link.

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